I looked up at Stroud. He was peering over the desk at the sections of newspaper. “There’s more,” he said quietly.
I opened the file once again, and there were other clippings that had not fallen to the floor.
I took them out one by one.
Alabama, the Union Springs Courier, October 11, 1950: GIRL, 10, KIDNAPPED, FOUND DEAD.
Once again in Alabama, a town called Heflin on February 3, 1951: CHILD MURDERED, POLICE BAFFLED.
From Pulaski, Tennessee on August 16, 1952: LOCAL GIRL FOUND DEAD.
The last one was from Calhoun, right back here in Georgia, on January 10, 1954: MISSING GIRL DISCOVERED DEAD.
“You see where he was going?” Stroud asked.
I looked up at Stroud.
“Shee-it, Mr. Vaughan, you’re damned near white as a bedsheet.”
“It carried on,” I said, barely able to find my words. Heart stopped in my chest, a feeling of claustrophobia, a tension that held me rigid in the chair.
“Certainly appears that Sheriff Dearing was of that opinion,” Stroud said.
“And he was still looking for him. After all these years Dearing knew he was still out there and he was trying to find him, wasn’t he?”
Stroud said nothing until the silence became tangible. Finally he spoke, “You were here when the Kruger guy hanged himself, right?”
I nodded. “Back in February of ’49. I left for Brooklyn a couple of months later.”
“You heard rumors?”
“About what? About Gunther Kruger?”
Stroud nodded. “That he wasn’t responsible for those murders . . .”
I shook my head. “Gunther Kruger is dead, Sheriff, and there’s nothing we can do to change that. I don’t know whether Haynes Dearing had anything to do with Gunther Kruger’s death, at least not directly—”
“But there were rumors, Mr. Vaughan.”
“Rumors are rumors, Sheriff Stroud. I came down here looking for some kind of understanding that was reliable.”
Stroud shook his head. “That I can’t help you with. You’re talking about things that happened the better part of twenty and thirty years ago. There aren’t that many people left here that you’d remember. People moved on, went different places as they do. Other folks died, like Reilly Hawkins, Frank Turow. Even Gene Fricker . . . never met a man I considered healthier . . . he was hit by a car in Camden County. Killed him outright. His son’s still here but he has a family all his own. Minds his business, you know? Don’t know that I can necessarily speak for all of them, but it seems to be that they wouldn’t want to go dredging up the past.”
“I’m not here to upset people, Sheriff.”
Stroud smiled, but there was a suspicious undercurrent in his tone when he asked, “So why exactly are you here, Mr. Vaughan?”
I thought for a moment of what to tell him. “I don’t know, Sheriff. I suppose I don’t have a single understandable reason for being here.”
“These are simple people, Mr. Vaughan. This town went through a terrible thing, but that was a lot of years ago. People have chosen to forget what took place, and though I can sympathize with your situation I cannot encourage you to go stirring things up that have no relevance to Augusta Falls as it is now. I can’t stop you being here, and I have no wish to, but I can ask you to be discreet, to see whoever you came here to see, and then to move on.”
I gathered the newspaper clippings together and returned them to the file. I handed the file back to Stroud and rose to my feet. “You have any idea where I’d start looking for Haynes Dearing?” I asked.
Stroud rose also, and I sensed in him a feeling of relief that I was leaving. “Haynes Dearing? Christ, I wouldn’t know where to start. Last place I heard of him was Valdosta, like I said. You could speak to the Sheriff’s Department people out there and see if they know what happened to him. I wouldn’t even know if he was still alive, Mr. Vaughan.”
I extended my hand, thanked Sheriff Stroud for his help, and turned to leave. It was as I did so that I noticed a slip of paper beneath the chair where I’d sat. I leaned down to retrieve it, and turned it over. There, printed in Haynes Dearing’s unmistakable script, was a single question: Where did the boy go after Jesup?
I held it out to Stroud. “You know what this means?” I asked.
Stroud took the slip of paper, read the question, shook his head.
“Wouldn’t have a clue, Mr. Vaughan.” He put it in the file along with the newspaper clippings. “Didn’t the Kruger family end up in Jesup?”
I didn’t reply. An image came to me. Gunther Kruger standing on the road that night, his long coat, the ominous sense of fear that had assaulted me when I saw him. And then he’d turned and hurried back to the house. Could I have been mistaken? Had it not been Gunther Kruger at all?
“I think so,” I said brusquely. “I think they did, yes.” I wished Sheriff Stroud goodbye and left his office. I hurried back to the motel and into my room. I sat on the edge of the bed. I took a piece of paper and wrote down the names of the towns from Stroud’s file. Union Springs, Heflin, Pulaski and Calhoun. My mind was spinning. Everything I’d considered was suddenly upside down and back to front. Had it not been Gunther Kruger at all? Had it been someone else wearing Gunther’s coat? And why had my mother been so convinced that the child killer was in the house that night she set the fire?
I stayed motionless for some time. I could hardly breathe. I lay down and tried to close my eyes but image after image invaded my mind and made me nauseous. Eventually I crossed the narrow room and opened the door. I stood there taking deep breaths, trying my best to remain grounded. But the ground was unstable, and I had to step back and sit down again. I held onto the edge of the bed as the walls buckled and swayed awkwardly.
An hour passed, perhaps more. I opened my eyes and realized that I’d lain back on the mattress and fallen asleep. The motel cabin door was still half open, and I stood up and closed it. I sluiced my face in the cupboard-sized bathroom, and dried my hands on a towel that was mottled gray and worn through in places.
I wanted to leave Augusta Falls. Everything that I’d imagined was here was now gone. It was not the buildings, it was not roads or landmarks, it was the spirit of the place. Perhaps because I was no longer a child, and thus I did not see these things the way I once had.
A little later I took the newspaper clippings from my bag and put them in my jacket pocket. I locked the motel cabin door, walked past the reception office toward the center of town. There was a laundromat on the corner, and here I asked a woman if she knew the Fricker house.
“Maurice Fricker? Sure I know where he lives. Out of here, turn right, on past the Sheriff’s Office to the end of the street. At the crossroads take a left, and down there about a quarter mile there’s a house on your left. You can’t miss it. It’s got blue window frames, and in the front yard there’s a mailbox with a weather vane on top.”
I thanked the woman and left. Following her directions, I stood before the Fricker house within a matter of minutes. There was a mailbox with a weather vane on top, and sitting on the porch steps was a girl that couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old with her hair tied back with barrettes. She used her hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
“Your daddy home?” I called out.
The girl squinted at me, and then suddenly she turned, ran up the steps and banged her way through the screen door.
Moments later the inner door swung open, and through the mesh of the screen I could see someone standing there. “You got business here?” he shouted, and immediately, without a doubt, I recognized Maurice Fricker’s voice.
“Maurice?” I called back. “Is that you, Maurice?”
The man hesitated, his hand reaching out to open the screen, and I started walking toward the house.
“Christ al-fucking-mighty,” he hissed through his teeth. “Jesus. It’s you, isn’t it? Joseph Vaughan.”
Maurice Fricker swung the door wide and came down
the steps. I came to a stop in the front yard. He’d always looked like his father, Gene, but now—at age forty—Maurice was a living, breathing image of the man.
Maurice hugged me until I was breathless, clapped my back enthusiastically. He stepped back, held my shoulders with his hands, and then he hugged me once more.
“My God, Joseph, I honestly believed I’d never see you again. Hell, come up onto the porch, we’ll get some beers and have a drink. Goddarn lucky you caught me here. I’m on a day’s layover before I go back to the job in White Oak.” He turned, started walking, and then he stopped and faced me once again. “God, man, this is one helluva thing. I honestly believed I’d never see you again. Hell, I don’t even know what to say to you.”
I followed him to the porch, and through and to the left was a veranda with some high-backed wooden chairs.
Maurice asked me to sit down, and then he backed up, opened the inner door, and called through to the darkness of the house. “Ellie, be a sweetheart, go in the icebox and get daddy a couple of beers!”
The little girl with the barrettes appeared within a few moments.
“Ellie, this here’s Joseph,” Maurice said.
“Hey there, Ellie,” I said. I smiled.
Ellie looked uncomfortable, but tried to smile back. She set the bottles of beer down on the porch, then ran back into the house.
“She’s the shy one,” Maurice said. “I have another girl, Lacey. She and her mom are over at the grandma’s place in Homeland. You remember Bob Gorman, tri-county coroner?”
“Sure I do, yes.”
“I married his youngest daughter, Annabel. You ever meet her?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think I did.”
“Helluva girl, Joseph, just one helluva girl.” He twisted the cap off a bottle of beer and handed it to me.
We sat in silence for a little while, and I could sense it around Maurice—the certainty of why I’d come, and beneath it the wish that I hadn’t.
“So things went to shit, didn’t they?” he said. “Out in New York.”
I smiled, looked out over the veranda railing toward the fields in the distance. My childhood was out there, running through shoulder-high maize and wheat, carrying books from Miss Webber’s class, listening to Reilly Hawkins tell tall tales in his kitchen. “You could say that,” I replied.
“And that thing . . . with the girl . . .”
“Bridget,” I said, and it felt so strange to be speaking with Maurice Fricker about something that he could never know anything about. “You read my book?”
Maurice shrugged. “Some,” he said. “Never been much of a reader, you know?” He smiled, and he seemed tired, worn at the edge. “My wife, she read it. But hell, she never knew you, so for her it was like reading a novel. Seems to me that those who weren’t here could never understand what it was like.” He drank his beer. “You heard about Reilly Hawkins?”
I nodded.
“My dad too. He was killed by some drunk-driving asshole out in Camden County. I have my wife and my two girls.” He laughed. “They keep me on my toes. Sometimes think there’s so much of the present that I have no time to think of the past.”
“The others?” I asked. “You ever see them?”
Maurice frowned. “Others?”
“Daniel McRae. Ronnie Duggan. Michael Wiltsey, remember, the King of Fidget?”
“Hell yes, I remember him. He’s still here, Joseph, but Daniel’s long since gone. Joined the Army back in . . . hell, when was it? Must’ve been ten years ago. Wanted to see the world and figured it was best to do it on Uncle Sam’s ticket.”
“The Guardians,” I said, and I felt the air suddenly chill and grow cold.
Maurice laughed, at least tried to laugh, but there was anxiety in the sound. “That was an eternity ago. We were kids, Joseph, nothing but scared little kids. We figured we could do something, but—”
Maurice Fricker turned to face me and there were tears in his eyes. “There hasn’t been a year gone by when I haven’t thought of those little girls, Joseph. I got my own kids now, Annabel tells me I worry all the time, that I fuss around them too much. She tells me they have to learn their independence, have to make their own way in the world, but she wasn’t there, right? She wasn’t there when those girls were murdered. Her father was the coroner. I wonder if she wasn’t somehow hardened to it, but she’s the kind of person who sees good in everything and everybody. I make her drive our girls to school, make her collect them when they’re done. Other kids’ folks don’t do that. They let them walk half a mile there and back, even in the winter when it’s dark in the afternoon. And sometimes I see things that remind me of how scared we all were. When they built all those extensions to the schoolhouse there was no one who was happier than me. Before that the place used to remind me every time I went past it.” Maurice’s voice trailed away into silence.
“I think it’s still happening,” I said.
Maurice shook his head. “No, it’s not, Joseph. You’re mistaken. They found out who it was and he hanged himself. The German. Gunther Kruger. He was the child killer, right? Everyone knows that he killed those little girls and that’s all there is to it. It’s been and gone. It’s over. That’s all I’ve got to say about it, Joseph.”
I took another sip of my beer and set the bottle down on the ground. I rose slowly from the chair and looked down at Maurice Fricker. “It’s okay,” I said, knowing that any attempt I made to involve him in this thing would only serve to make him feel guilty for doing nothing. “You’re probably right, Maurice, you know? It’s over. It ended all the way back there.” I smiled as best I could. “Maybe it’s all been a bit too much for me. I spent a great deal of years in prison. Maybe it made me a little crazy, eh?”
Maurice didn’t get up. He looked at me as I made my way to the porch door.
“You have a beautiful daughter,” I said. “You did the right thing, Maurice. Believe me, you did the right thing. You did what I should have done. Should have stayed here and gotten myself married, got some kids like you. Never should have gone to New York.”
Maurice shook his head slowly. “You weren’t the same as anyone else, Joseph Vaughan. You never were and you never will be. You got Miss Webber to fall in love with you, right?”
I nodded, “Sure I did.”
“You were always the odd one out,” Maurice said. “You were always asking questions about things no one else had a mind to find out about. Writing stories. Writing books that got published. Seems to me you’re the one who’s lived more life than all of us put together.”
“Don’t have one helluva lot to show for it though, do I?” I said, and I reached out my hand and pushed the door open. “I’m gonna go now,” I said. “You take care of yourself, Maurice, and your wife and your daughters. And don’t worry what she says, it seems to me you can never take too much care of children, even these days.”
Maurice raised his hand. “Maybe I’ll see you again, Joseph. I’d ask you to stay for dinner, but—”
“Ghosts don’t come to dinner, Maurice,” I said, and then I turned and walked away.
I glanced back when I reached the end of the yard, and there—just behind the screen door—I could see Ellie watching me through the mesh. She could have been any of them, Laverna, Elena, Virginia Grace. My breath caught in my chest, and then she raised her hand and waved once before disappearing into darkness.
I found Ronnie Duggan standing outside what was once the Falls Inn. It seemed his bangs had finally conceded defeat. His hair was thinning, swept back from a still youthful face, but there was a bitterness around his eyes that his smile could not disguise.
“I heard you were here,” was his greeting, and he sort of leaned back against the railing at the front of the building. “Dennis Stroud gave me a call and said you’d come back.”
“Hello, Ronnie,” I said, and knew that my return was not welcomed.
“Hey there, Joseph,” he said. “I called Michael, said he shou
ld come down and say hi, but he’s got to drive his wife over to some bridge class or some such.”
“The Falls Inn,” I said, looking up at the building behind him.
“Not for many years. Frank Turow died, you know, and then there was a guy called McGonagle. Now it’s owned by some company in Augusta and they serve warm beer and white wine spritzers. It ain’t the place it was . . . hell, Augusta Falls ain’t the place it was.”
“I gathered that.”
“It’s good to see you,” he said. He tucked his thumbs in the belt of his jeans.
“I don’t think it is, Ronnie.”
“Shee-it, no one calls me Ronnie now, Joseph. That was my kid name. Everyone calls me Ron. Just Ron, nothing more than that.”
“I spoke to Maurice—”
“Maurice is a good man, Joseph. He has a wife and two daughters and a dog and a cat. He has a good job with the sanitation department out in White Oak. The man’s made a place for himself here, gonna stay here until he dies. He’ll see grandkids, maybe even more, and I figure the last thing in the world he wants to see is you.”
I looked down at the ground. I remembered the Guardians. It seemed I was the only one that did.
“I won’t be staying, Ron,” I said, “but I wanted to ask you a couple of things before I left.” I looked up at him closely, and despite the thinning hair, despite the wary expression, I could still see Ronnie, bangs in his eyes, always fussing with something—a stone, a marble, a piece of wood.
“What started here ended here, Joseph. That’s the way I feel and I think that’s the way most people around here want it to stay. I’m sorry for your troubles. I heard about Alex Webber losing the baby an’ all, and then that trouble you had in Brooklyn . . . you know, the fact that you spent all them years in prison—”
“Do you think it was Gunther Kruger?” I interjected.
Ron Duggan snorted. “Gunther Kruger hanged himself. I figure that’s as good an admission of guilt as you’re ever gonna get from anyone.”
“You think he did that, or you think he was hiding? Do you think maybe he knew who it was and he was covering for them?”